Team rebuilding world's first website

By Doug Gross, CNN

Updated 1:33 PM ET, Tue April 30, 2013

Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – The Web's first site was created by CERN in 1989. On April 30, 1993, it was made available to the world royalty-free. The design of the site is very different from Web pages today but also showed the roots of what was to come. It can be fun to look through Internet history, so CNN consulted the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find out what early versions of other websites looked like. Click through the gallery for a trip back in time.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – A white background with bright blue links helped yahoo.com users find what they were looking for in October 1996.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – The altavista.com site is now an iconic darling of Internet history. The October 1996 version of the site boasted a search field, a banner ad and some fun extras.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – For those looking to find a sense of community online, the geocities.com of October 1996 presented a colorful option.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – A commenter with the username Kandric suggested several memorable websites from the 1990s. Shown here are nhl.com and nfl.com as they appeared in December 1996, plus CNET.com as it was seen in October 1996.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – The whitehouse.gov of December 1996 included a search feature and a text-only site.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – The New York Times front page, as it appeared in December 1996, is compact by modern Web design standards.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – Still getting CD-ROMs in the mail? Primary colors and an article on "marginal behavior" online were viewed by aol.com visitors in December 1996.

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Digging through website history – Ready to jet? Get flight information and more from the usairways.com website of October 1997.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – Go ahead, ask the Internet a question. The askjeeves.com site, shown in October 1997, boasted an online butler of sorts.

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Digging through website history – This screenshot of news.bbc.co.uk in December 1998 exemplifies the narrow, vertical design of websites in the 1990s to accommodate lower-resolution monitors.

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Digging through website history – News, information and various Web services could be found at the netscape.com homepage of May 1998.

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Digging through website history20 photos

Digging through website history – Hampsterdance.com, shown here as it looked in April 1999, gained popularity for its catchy background tune and cute rodent graphics.

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Digging through website history – The Google.com landing page of October 1999 looks similar to its current version. But the site now offers many other services beyond search.

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Digging through website history – "The first website I ever went to was Cartoon Network's, circa 1998," said a commenter named maxemoose36. "I remember I was looking for something about Johnny Bravo." This screenshot of cartoonnetwork.com is from October 1999.

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Digging through website history – "Baaaah," said goat mascot Frank of livejournal.com. This screenshot shows the social blogging site as it appeared in November 1999.

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Digging through website history – You can make a weblog and communicate with people online. Just visit blogger.com in October 1999 to get started; it's like "magic," just like the site says.

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Digging through website history – Purple and lavender accents adorned the CNN.com homepage in August 2000. Election season was well under way.

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Digging through website history – "Your digital video repository" could have been at Youtube.com in July 2005.

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Digging through website history – Visitors to myspace.com, shown here as it looked in July 2006, connected with friends against the backdrop of a slightly different layout.

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Story highlights

An effort is under way by the group that created the Web to rebuild its first site

CERN researchers created the World Wide Web in 1989

It was released free to the public on April 30, 1993

Researchers say they want a new generation to see what the Web was like then

Twenty years ago, a team of researchers shared the Webwith the world. Now they want to show a generation that grew up onlinewhat it was like in its earliest days.

In honor of the anniversary, a team has been assembled to recreate a working version of the first website, a how-to guide hosted by the project's creators.

The organization issued a statement on April 30, 1993, that announced the release ofthat Web to the public.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee created and named the Web (also commonly called "W3" for short in those days) in 1989 at CERN. Originally, it was designed as a way for scientists at different universities and other institutes to share information.

"Vague, but exciting," Berners-Lee's supervisor wrote on the cover of a proposal while greenlighting the project.

By 1993, there were roughly 400 known Web servers. But the World Wide Web accounted for only about 1% of Internet traffic. The rest was remote access to computer networks, e-mail and file transfers from one computer to another.

Since then it has, obviously, become a constant presence in the lives of people around the world. Today, there are somewhere around 630 million websites.

"There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the Web," said Rolf Heuer, CERN's director-general. "From research to business and education, the Web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The Web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."

The first website was, not surprisingly, devoted to the Web project itself, describing how to use it and set up a Web server. It was hosted on Berner-Lee's NeXt computer -- the product developed at a company founded by Steve Jobs before he returned to Apple.

That computer is still at CERN's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. But it no longer hosts that first website.

CERN's team aims to change that, restoring the earliest versions of files that were on the site as well as making it a home for stories about those formative days. They'll be combing CERN's servers for data preserved from that time.